Neighbouring zones

On Cecily Nicholson

Here’s a simple pleasure: a few words on what’s perhaps my favorite book of poetry from last year, Cecily Nicholson’s Triage (Talon Books 2011). And it’s a nice fit with this series of commentaries, as Cecil’s is perhaps the very embodiment and quintessential example of what I’m calling “neighbouring zones”—the sometimes overlapping, temporarily concatenated realms of art and activism, poetry and revolution. Long both a poet and an activist/community organizer, Nicholson’s poetry simmers up out of ten years of social work in Vancouver’s notoriously fraught Downtown East Side (“Canada’s poorest zip code,” as it’s often proclaimed).

Canada’s Tar Sands has a problem (irony alert: there are no end of problems with this nasty stuff)—it’s not easy to get out of the ground and out of the country to the “world market.” Right now, one major pipeline carries the goop to Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet, where it is loaded onto supertankers tourists can wave at from scenic Stanley Park. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, south, to Texas, has been (temporarily, perhaps) blocked. So now there are plans for a “Northern Gateway” pipeline to carry massive amounts of crude over 1,170 kilometers of forested and river-crisscrossed Northern BC—to the still largely undeveloped coast of the Great Bear Rainforest. Charming.

Into the fray steps a poetry anthology—The Enpipe Line (Creekstone Press 2012)—edited by a diverse collective that includes poet/activist and project founder Christine Leclerc (full disclosure: I am a contributor). Originally conceived as a 1,170 kilometer long line of collaborative poetry (matching the proposed pipeline’s length), the project eventually grew to over 70,000km.

In this year of “Occupy” and redefined “occupations,” with everything fluid, shifting. I want to approach the broad questions of poetry and politics once again, with fresh eyes. “Political poetry” means one thing, up to a point at which we might have to take direct political action; then its meaning changes somewhat. Which is to say that we perhaps overburden poetry if we make it the only and complete ground of our political “activism.” Which isn’t to say that poetry “doesn’t make anything happen”—it’s that a good deal more is happening, and needs to happen, than can be contained within the boundaries of a poem.

In this regard I have found Gerald Raunig’s approach in Art and Revolution instructive. Raunig describes these two spheres as “neighboring zones” which experience “temporary overlaps”—“not to incorporate one another, but rather to enter into a concrete exchange relationship for a limited time”—“transitions, overlaps, and concatenations of art and revolution become possible for a limited time, but without synthesis and identification.”

Is it possible to read contemporary poetry this way? To describe overlaps and concatenations—but sometimes to have to wander back out of the contact zone, and into further flung neighbourhoods? I will focus, primarily, on Canadian poetry, but will occasionally wander into British and American “zones,” as well as some historical literary spaces.

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Vancouver poet Stephen Collis is the author of six books of poetry and criticism, including the Dorothy Livesay Award–winning On the Material (Talon Books 2010). Three forthcoming books—all, in some ways, parts of the on-going “Barricades Project”—are in three different genres: A History of Change: Dispatches from the Occupation (2012—nonfiction), To the Barricades (2013—poetry) and The Red Album (2013—fiction).

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